Appreciate you making this video! You popped up on my home page and I really dig the soundscape you built with this creature. It inspires me for how to make character themes for this story I’m writing. How do you do prefer to reverse engineer the sounds you need in order to get a certain type of creature? Like your aquatic monster in this video. Do you research examples and then experiment until you find the right combo of sounds?
@@HouseOfIguere thanks for watching, and great questions! I usually take either 1 of 2 approaches; throw a lot of ideas at the wall quickly and see what sticks, or sit down and spend a fair amount of time doing research on the sonics of different animal source material. I tend to do the latter, as it helps to create a cohesive soundscape. I’ll first usually imagine what this creature would look like and ask many questions to better align on what it is that I’m designing. Is it big or small? Wide or thin? Does it have teeth or does it lack them? What’s its role in the story? Is it a harmful creature or an ally? From there, I’ll usually create a folder of cohesive “source” material. That typically involves grabbing a subset of audio files pertaining to certain animals that I can mix and match layers with to create variations. That might involve grabbing some horse and tiger chittering sounds, seal groans or dry ice sound effects. From there I’m usually pitching, resampling and creatively mangling them all to taste. If working on something aquatic, I’ll also try to be mindful of the hypothetical proximity - that is, if I’m designing a close-perspective animal vocalization, I like to add details to reflect that. These may involve the sounds of cooing, textured bellows, grumbles, clicky vocal diaphragm movement or anything else suiting the physical makeup. If it’s a more distant-perspective vocalization, omitting some of those textural layers can better sell the idea that the creature isn’t close by, and would lack that clarity and readability. I hope that helps answer the question to some extent :)
Thanks for sharing! Quick question : how do you use LUFS metering when making sound effects ? What should we aim for in terms of loudness ? Or do you use this just as a reference to make sure you're just not too low ?
(Edit: not sure why TH-cam struck a line through some of my text below, but please disregard that!) Hey there, thanks for watching :) This is a great question. LUFS metering can be especially useful when we want to keep our assets at a uniform level, usually as a premixing step. That is, if you owned all of the ambience audio design for a video game, it would be beneficial to mandate several LUFS values that you would export your assets at to make mixing in middleware or in-engine easier (eg: - 18 LUFS for close-medium proximity sounds, -23 LUFS for distant sounds, etc.) In my opinion, mandating this is essential when working on large-scale projects that could easily have hundreds of thousands of audio assets. This sort of uniformity allows you to confidently lower or boost a whole subgroup of assets in one broad stroke, rather than level matching them all and THEN performing a boost or attenuation. Getting this right at the source level will make your life way easier down the road :) As far as what LUFS value we should aim for: with video games, it's sort of the Wild West. Most projects I've been on adhere to an average of -23 LUFS Integrated over an hour of gameplay, +/- a few LUFS values to account for big moments or more subdued, quiet slices of gameplay. As it pertains to this video, I didn't approach designing the assets with any values in mind, I was just jamming. I find that most sounds I work on in my free time tend to end up in the -18 LUFS-I to -23 LUFS-I range, as I try to avoid overcompressing them. I'm mainly using the metering as a tool to check the phase coherence while avoiding being tooooo loud. However, when I'm mixing music, those loudness standards tend to be much different haha
Great tip and an absolute game changer for my approach to creatures, going to be using this a lot. Thanks!
@@whjsound9176 so glad to hear this was helpful, thanks for the kind words!
Great tutorial! Thanks for sharing your approach🙏🏼 I gotta check that creature speech, too.
Thanks so much! :)
Awesome video, Thank you for sharing this!!
Thanks for the kind words, hope it was helpful :)
Nice sound !
Appreciate you making this video! You popped up on my home page and I really dig the soundscape you built with this creature. It inspires me for how to make character themes for this story I’m writing.
How do you do prefer to reverse engineer the sounds you need in order to get a certain type of creature? Like your aquatic monster in this video. Do you research examples and then experiment until you find the right combo of sounds?
@@HouseOfIguere thanks for watching, and great questions!
I usually take either 1 of 2 approaches; throw a lot of ideas at the wall quickly and see what sticks, or sit down and spend a fair amount of time doing research on the sonics of different animal source material. I tend to do the latter, as it helps to create a cohesive soundscape. I’ll first usually imagine what this creature would look like and ask many questions to better align on what it is that I’m designing. Is it big or small? Wide or thin? Does it have teeth or does it lack them? What’s its role in the story? Is it a harmful creature or an ally?
From there, I’ll usually create a folder of cohesive “source” material. That typically involves grabbing a subset of audio files pertaining to certain animals that I can mix and match layers with to create variations. That might involve grabbing some horse and tiger chittering sounds, seal groans or dry ice sound effects. From there I’m usually pitching, resampling and creatively mangling them all to taste.
If working on something aquatic, I’ll also try to be mindful of the hypothetical proximity - that is, if I’m designing a close-perspective animal vocalization, I like to add details to reflect that. These may involve the sounds of cooing, textured bellows, grumbles, clicky vocal diaphragm movement or anything else suiting the physical makeup. If it’s a more distant-perspective vocalization, omitting some of those textural layers can better sell the idea that the creature isn’t close by, and would lack that clarity and readability.
I hope that helps answer the question to some extent :)
@ Yes - this was super helpful! I’m def gonna use this framework to help me organize my process better. Appreciate you giving such great game 🔥
@@HouseOfIguere cheers! 🤘🏼
Thanks for sharing! Quick question : how do you use LUFS metering when making sound effects ? What should we aim for in terms of loudness ? Or do you use this just as a reference to make sure you're just not too low ?
(Edit: not sure why TH-cam struck a line through some of my text below, but please disregard that!)
Hey there, thanks for watching :)
This is a great question. LUFS metering can be especially useful when we want to keep our assets at a uniform level, usually as a premixing step. That is, if you owned all of the ambience audio design for a video game, it would be beneficial to mandate several LUFS values that you would export your assets at to make mixing in middleware or in-engine easier (eg: - 18 LUFS for close-medium proximity sounds, -23 LUFS for distant sounds, etc.)
In my opinion, mandating this is essential when working on large-scale projects that could easily have hundreds of thousands of audio assets. This sort of uniformity allows you to confidently lower or boost a whole subgroup of assets in one broad stroke, rather than level matching them all and THEN performing a boost or attenuation. Getting this right at the source level will make your life way easier down the road :)
As far as what LUFS value we should aim for: with video games, it's sort of the Wild West. Most projects I've been on adhere to an average of -23 LUFS Integrated over an hour of gameplay, +/- a few LUFS values to account for big moments or more subdued, quiet slices of gameplay.
As it pertains to this video, I didn't approach designing the assets with any values in mind, I was just jamming. I find that most sounds I work on in my free time tend to end up in the -18 LUFS-I to -23 LUFS-I range, as I try to avoid overcompressing them. I'm mainly using the metering as a tool to check the phase coherence while avoiding being tooooo loud. However, when I'm mixing music, those loudness standards tend to be much different haha